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navel gazing

I do not like the word family held up as the highest title you can bestow on a friend or a romantic partner. This can be on its own or in the phrases “found family” or “chosen family.” Maybe this is largely on account of my privilege as a person who has a supportive immediate family. The way I love my family, particularly my parents, is rougher and more complicated than the way I love anyone else. It involves brokenness, waxing and waning trust, and rebuilding that I most likely wouldn’t be willing to go through with a romantic partner. The concept of unconditional love has always seemed like an excuse to not work harder to be good to each other, but my actual family is the only structure in which anything close to it exists. It is a unique dynamic, but does it make it more sacred than friendship and romantic love? No, I don’t think so.

The assumption that friendship and romance as their own paradigms don’t hold enough weight seems wrong to me. While I can see the comfort in the idea of found family – particularly if your own blood has been a litany of disappointments and failures to connect – it’s just not a barrier I want to cross. I used to want it so badly it caused me incredible grief. In the interest of being a more reliable narrator, my distaste is probably in part just an attempt to forge that grief into something more dignified. But like an indignant child, I am here to tell you that I also buy where I’ve landed, really, I do.

I think the idea that some of our most important relationships are held together by nothing more than choice can be terrifying. We can understand the positives and power of it – wow, they have no reason to be here beyond their own belief in my place in their life – and still desperately want to construct a buffer. And what better safety net than to compare someone to the one relationship you had no choice in – that you can singe off through estrangement but never truly erase? The people who do make that break face oppressive stigma. Even abused children are often told “she’ll always be your mother!” I can’t help but see the need to declare our self-made bonds familial as a sort of stake in the ground; a salt circle in which relationships that are as fragile as any become fortified.

My parents are, of course, family. Were their previous marriages families before children were involved? That’s an interesting question to me. When pressed, I think most people would say that marriages in and of themselves are family units, but you still hardly ever hear the phrase “childless family” vs. “childless couple.” I’m biased, because my own experience with marriage is a facet of my problem with the word family. I fear marriage because it stands in bureaucratic defiance to my belief that people should be able to leave relationships at any time for any reason. Before and during my divorce, I bristled at my husband referring to us – two people increasingly incomprehensible to each other – as a family. I’m comfortable saying I belong to my family; that I am a member of it. I’m not comfortable saying that about anyone else. Just as I am cynical about the prospect of ever getting married again, it’s hard to imagine calling or wanting to be called family by a romantic partner.

It’s not that I don’t take obligations and responsibilities to our friends and partners seriously. I do, probably more now than I ever have. But the nature of those commitments is so different than what I feel toward my family. I know if my friends and I had gone through some of the rough patches my siblings and I have, we would no longer be friends. Romantic love in particular is delicate and conditional. The work is messy. When it involves terribly contentious things like fidelity and boredom and sex it becomes a different beast than any other type of relationship. The difficulties of romance can be very lonely and it’s not pleasant to realize how tenuous and easy to lose it is. I think it’s tempting to want to call it family, to override the potential for pain, to believe we have a reason for being together beyond wanting to, and still wanting to the day after.

I know that when most people call their friends family, they only say it as the highest compliment. I don’t mean to disregard their personal sorting systems and the places in which they hold their loved ones. You could (rightly, probably) accuse me of having the darkest possible take on these words. But I do aggressively believe in being good to the people we love, and that it’s difficult, and that part of that difficulty involves being honest about what things are. Or maybe I’m just envious.

Your green babydoll shift dress has proven to be one of the safest things you own. It’s old, cheap, and you got it on vacation in a foreign country so nobody else has it. It communicates enough personal style without demanding attention – a surprisingly impenetrable armor not of swagger, but of quiet girlishness. At your best, this dress makes you feel like you could make everyone fall in love with you in a nonthreatening, asexual way. But you’re not at your best, and the trusty green babydoll also makes you a little shinier than you actually are. It is the most reliable path through the angst of seeing your natural enemy.

A warm hello doesn’t make it past your throat. She waves. It’s not a friendly wave and it reaches you as a sort of sardonic “we’re on this shitty boat together for an evening, I guess.” You wave back and smile in your mind, but you can’t remember if you actually carried it out. You hope the green babydoll is softening your sad bastard pout into something sweeter and more demure. It strikes you that you want her to despise you but also to think of you as a small animal undeserving of her scorn.

You need another drink. You think about buying her a drink. You don’t. At the bar, she’s waiting to pay her tab. You both miscalculated the timing and are annoyed at being stuck in each other’s line of sight. You are trying to work up the courage to pay her tab, for reasons not entirely clear even to you. You are trying to condense every emotion you’ve ever felt – hatred, jealousy, respect, longing, a mutant strain of fondness, guilt – into one facial expression. It comes out as a thousand-yard stare.

You try to zap your daydream that you have only just become aware of directly into her brain through sheer force of will. In this dream it’s a boozy party still on the holiday side of winter and the clothes are more glamorous. This dress is a dark jewel tone silk – deep pine or midnight blue (it catches the light so beautifully that nobody can be sure). What it lacks in flash it makes up for in elegance, with a skirt that flutters when your boyfriend spins you and catches you in a perfectly executed hip lift – because this is a dancing event and you can do that now. Your mother’s diamond and ruby estate bracelet is on loan for the night. It’s late enough that cheeks are flushed and hair is out of place (half up, tendrils). You tend to dream in diaphanous pastels that blur at the edges but in this dream, you and your clothes are solidly rooted in the boundaries and sweat of real bodies. In the glow of alcohol and celebration you smack straight into her and don’t have time to wipe the unguarded, dance-crazed grin off your face so you take the risk of leaving it there. This gambit not only manages to neutralize everything that has come before, but her heart is utterly captivated by how charming and actually nice when you get to know her you seem to be. You laugh loudly and sincerely and dance together with the joy only two drunk people could. Some time later you see a photo a friend snapped without either of you noticing. Your smile is real and crooked in a way that only shows up when you don’t feel watched. Your arms look very skinny. You never go on to become close friends, but you are always genuinely glad to see each other. You both treasure the candid photo and count it among the most flattering pictures ever taken of you, respectively and collectively.

Everyone online is talking about skincare! Actually they already were, but last week a skincare-critical article in The Outline brought it to the forefront and also led outlets who already publish stories about skincare on a daily basis to exclaim “everyone is into skincare?!”

Like most of my millennial skincare enthusiast peers, I wasn’t a fan of the Outline piece. I didn’t appreciate the assumption that those of us who choose to be passionate about skincare are somehow being duped or fooled. It got some things right, mainly “Within the current paradigm, a blemish seems like a referendum on who you are as a person.” Skincare-as-moral coding is something I’ve long read into the marketing of certain brands like Glossier (still buy their makeup) and many “clean beauty” lines. About my own skin anxiety I wrote, “My face is something I can’t hide, and if I can’t present something close to perfect to the world, then I’ve failed at self-management.” Skincare can be exhausting. It can bring on a new wave of stress when I’m struggling with self-harm and the chasm between the now and the ideal seems wider than ever. And because skincare is a huge industry like any other, it can be hard not to cave to the pressure to try every new trend and wonder if the routine you’ve locked down is good enough, expensive enough, or Holy Grail enough.

I have recently gotten very into Lana Del Rey – her decidedly not training montage material even dominates my running playlist. I’ve been aware of the siren with the 1,000 yard stare since she hit the scene in 2011 but avoided her, maybe unintentionally, for six years. As someone who runs in an unapologetically feminist circle, Lana Del Rey is not exactly on message. Outside of my bubble, Lana’s conceit is likewise out of tune with the zeitgeist. The current image of stars like Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato, and Ariana Grande generally espouse agency and confidence. Although their songs can deal with tumultuous relationships, the message that wins out is almost always self-love and self-care. Lana, on the other hand, is often subsuming herself in the shadow of a man. Her (very internally consistent) world of dangerous, negligent men, affairs, and sugar daddies isn’t something I aspire to. But here’s the thing – it still speaks to me and my life much more than dozens of girl power creeds. It may be bad feminism, but damn if it doesn’t resonate with me.